What's In A Name
by frooit
Summary: His parents and most strangers call him Eugene.


**what's in a name**  
_the pacific, semi snafu/sledge_  
_by lilnee_

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His parents and most strangers call him Eugene. If you knew him for long enough, or from a time that's almost certainly gone now, you'd shorten that to Gene. It could be his favourite if he had to have one. Men and boys alike in this part of the world just call him Sledge. The use of surnames excludes confusion, they tell him. It's something they urge you to grasp in boot camp (before that clubhouse feeling wears off in a flash fire instant). The generation of a handle, a nickname, even a regiment joke gone sticky—and he's familiar with those too—happens all too often. Someone may not like their God given name or they may come to the war with a strange reputation already, whatever it may be, having a name, a place, makes life in service a little more personable.

Eugene can't quite remember if it's day ten or eleven. He's missed one, he knows it. His pencil, just a greasy sliver of wood pinched in two fingers, poises above the thrice folded shred of paper. All these days and no landmarks, just guts and bone and meat flies. He'd fallen asleep and slept most the night through, thank God. Not common and not restful. The overpowering tire eventually gets its way and pulls him under. He'll remember this unease and distrust of slumber for some time to come. The snatch of paper caught under the butt of his hand trembles in the wind, wanting desperately to shoot off and be gone. He can sympathize. He can relate.

"Yo, Sledgehammer."

It comes out as _Sledgehamma_, that Cajun verbal vomit Snafu calls a language doing its worst.

"You writin' to your sweetheart?"

Eugene glances up at him.

"Huh," Snafu groans.

Eugene can hardly make out his face even from this close a distance. There's no sunlight hitting on this island. More of a haze of grey and overcast, and rain clouds more than ready to open up and drown them all like the American rats they've come to feel like. In this half-light all of Snafu he can distinctly see and it's lips and eyes. The rest of him is a smatter of mud and grainy particulates, just tiny exaggerations here and there. He has a tear in his uniform, a gaping hole. Mud's gotten much of his hair and helmet as well. He turns his head to spit, gritting his teeth on the taste.

"Give my left nut just for ah drink."

He lolls his tongue out and looks to the sky.

"I can help ya with that," one of the new additions chimes in.

Eugene would rather not add a name.

"Yeah, ya'd like that wouldn't you?" Snafu chides, stepping over rocks, into standing puddles and through trampled vegetation. Everything's either black or grey here. Sometimes it'll be rosy shaded, and that's an alarming change. It's not by something flowery but by something terrible: a terrible human act, a terrible human tragedy.

Eugene sighs.

He just can't remember.

"What day is it?" he asks, looking up to meet Snafu's nocturnal wide eyes.

"Well, shit, it's Sunday, Sledge. Put on your church best."

Eugene doesn't respond as Snafu takes himself to his knees, looking over the wrong end of the palm-sized book.

"Got your B-I-B-L-E, I see."

Eugene closes it, pencil tucked into the fold and safe. He returns them to his breast pocket. Snafu rocks back, watching all of this closely. He runs a hand through his mess of hair, helmet upturned in his lap. His mitts are in just as bad a shape. He'll be scrubbing shit and Japanese soil from underneath those nails for years to come, and the stink he'll be scrubbing off for longer (the blood stains). He doesn't make direct eye contact back. Those internal greasy wheels and gears visibly turn. He's thinking something over. Eugene knows him well enough to recognize disaster. It's never a good thing for someone like him to find the need to rethink or censor his thoughts.

"You pray at all, G?"

Eugene brings his legs up.

"Sometimes."

Snafu leans in close, like the leading man in a romantic flick, but stops before their noses bump. Eugene's mouth parts instinctively, letting all his air away. He shouldn't be surprised, he tries not to be, but it's hopeless.

"Pray for me, huh?"

Eugene wants to chuckle.

"What?"

Snafu drifts away, makes like he's going to leave, doesn't leave, and then finally goes, rifle in hand, mud sucking on every foot fall. He doesn't look back, just pops his helmet on and keeps pace until he's gone. Eugene sits long after taking in the interaction. Those eyes, lover close. An ocean of blue bursting around a pin dot black pupil, whites threaded through with red filaments. He's obviously tired. The walking dead.

They all are.

Eugene doesn't see him again until nightfall.

He doesn't see him, even so, he hears him.

Whispers like voodoo chants.

Gun pop on the horizon.

Wind howl.

"Snafu?"

He finds him tucked against the boulder he'd been on the far side of hours prior.

A flare discharges, rises up the backdrop of sky to its pinnacle and bursts light in omni-directions.

He looks caught in the act, off kilter.

Eugene regards this.

"I'm sor—"

"Fuck that."

Eugene shrugs, crouches down.

"Have you slept?"

The flare's blaze is losing its effect, Snafu's face falling into shadow. Just his eyes now, wet and unblinking.

"Ya got enough for the both of us, ah think."

He leaves out the part about how he had watched.

Because he had.

He'd watched Eugene sleep.

"You know damn well that's a bad idea," Eugene says.

"Oh, big daddy Sledge givin' me ah talkin' to."

Eugene shoulders his rifle. He shoves Snafu over, none too kindly, and comes to rest next to him. The wetness on his ass does nothing for his moral but the warmth from the extra body has its good affects. He's at a plateau—not good and not bad. He sets his rifle next to him, muzzle against the boulder, butt in the mud. Snafu's owl eyes stay on him.

"No help if you're fallin' asleep. End up shootin' one of us thinkin' it's a Jap."

"Ah'd done that already if I was gonna."

Eugene knocks him with his shoulder.

"Just close your eyes and shut up."

And he does.

Eugene eyes him.

"How ya gonna sleep sittin' straight as a board like that?"

"How can I sleep at all with you yappin' every two damn seconds?"

He shifts and folds his arms, leaning heavier and heavier (as if testing) on Eugene. His helmet he removed, it sits now bowl up with his rifle and Bowie knife. His head comes down lightly, temple pressing into Eugene's bony shoulder. His face becomes lax and even with time, sharp angles of stress and anger smoothing (all his usual traits).

It's not twenty minutes later when he's ridged, mumbling. Eugene listens for a time, words unintelligible, tone tense. He finally wedges an arm behind his back and over his far shoulder. He doesn't want to disturb him just yet but he does give him a shake, just like the ones his mother would do. He whispers: _hey, hey_. Even that little sound is just too damn loud in the anticipating, empty air.

Like an elephant in the woods.

"_Gene_?"

It's more than just his name. Maybe just sleep-fogged but it was out of character either way, out of this world, not for this world. Too soft, too fragile, too strange. Like that of a boy. A despairingly young boy. He does a shoddy job at ignoring it. He hasn't once used that incarnation and that makes Eugene nervous. Scared, frankly. He puts more oomph into the next shake. Snafu recoils and pulls away. He asked for this. Whether or not he knew what it meant at the time, he asked for it. Insisted even. And now he's got to deal with it.

"Just dreaming," he says.

"Don' dream," Snafu mutters.

He sits upright and remains quiet.

Eugene breaks the silence.

"I'll pray for you."

He adds, "As long as you don't do anything stupid."

Snafu chews his bottom lip.

He wasn't expecting a response but he gives him one.

Has to wait fifteen minutes for it.

"Fine."

His God given name, Merriell, means of the shining sea. His eyes reflect that as he looks at him.

Deep, turbulent and huge.

Eugene will pray for strength.

For the both of them.


End file.
